The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (159 page)

It would not have displeased Mendoza to report in May 1527 a London near to rebellion, especially angered at the prospect of a French marriage for Mary. Handbills opposing it were being circulated at night, and pasquinades critical of both Henry and Wolsey were appearing all over the city.
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And although Mendoza was probably exaggerating, the government was taking the situation extremely seriously. Edward Hall records ‘a great watch’ being ordered throughout the city on the last day of April,
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while on 30 June Henry wrote to all the great livery companies warning them against ‘divers persons of light disposition which study to raise and bring up seditious, untrue, and slanderous rumours’, ordering them to do everything possible to suppress their activities.
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At the same time a massive propaganda exercise, including an exchange of the highest chivalric honours the English and French kings could grant, the orders of the garter and St Michael, in order to win people over to the new alliance was undertaken. For his part, Wolsey appears to have made two lengthy speeches in Star Chamber, one shortly after his return from France, presumably in October 1527,
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and the other in February 1528 following the formal declaration of war against the emperor.
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On both occasions the audience was large, including, at least on the first, not only representatives of the city of London but JPs from all over the country. But on neither occasion, at least according to Hall and he is about the only source for these two speeches, was the audience very impressed:

Some knocked the other on the elbow and said softly he lieth, others said that evil will said never well, others said that the French crowns made him speak evil of the emperor, but they that knew all that you have heard before said that it was a shame for him to lie in such an audience
.
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Hall’s chronic francophobia calls for caution in interpreting his account, but it receives support from too many sources for it to be ignored or explained away.
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Nor did the unpopularity of the French alliance stem only from the traditional francophobia, which, after all, had not prevented the nation from earlier becoming increasingly reluctant to pay for a war against France, which had cost some £470,000. And having shown every sign of refusing to pay the Amicable Grant of 1525, now, in 1527, they were faced not only with the prospect of further taxation for war against England’s traditional friends, but also with a disruption of the vital trade with the Low Countries. What with the disastrous harvest of that year, bringing with it the likelihood of severe grain shortages and high prices, and, on top of all this, rumours that Henry was determined to get rid of his popular, ‘Imperialist’
queen, no wonder the government felt under some pressure!

Before we discuss the consequences of this pressure upon Wolsey, it will be useful to dispose of the question of whether or not it was being in any way manipulated by his potential rivals, particularly Norfolk and Suffolk. Much of the argument already presented would suggest that the answer must be no. But that the two dukes turned down the opportunity afforded by the troubles in East Anglia to further a plot to topple Wolsey does not in itself settle the matter. To have come out in support of, or to have attempted to manipulate, the ‘many-headed monster’ that the poorer classes became when restless would have been to play with the kind of fire that Tudor noblemen on the whole avoided. On the other hand, to try to persuade the king that his chief adviser was advocating a foreign policy wholly detrimental to the king’s own interests would have been merely to perform the good office of a royal councillor. It is just conceivable that a dislike of the pro-French direction of foreign policy, which it would have been easy to blame on Wolsey, could have united enough important people in moves to change that direction by advocating the removal of the man so closely identified with it.

The notion that this was what the triumvirate tried to do depends largely on the belief that Norfolk was at this time pro-Imperialist. But the evidence is slight and, such as it is, difficult to interpret. Given his assumption that everyone except Wolsey was on his side, the fact that Mendoza saw Norfolk as being sympathetic to the emperor is not very conclusive. Similarly du Bellay, who saw everybody as anti-French, included Norfolk in this category. So also did members of an important French mission to England in the spring of 1527. Moreover, a French account of that embassy appears at first sight to offer proof not only that Norfolk was pro-Imperialist, but that he was prepared to fight for a pro-Imperialist policy in direct opposition to Wolsey’s wishes, even as far as launching an attack, in the king’s presence, on both Wolsey and the policy he was pursuing.
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The only trouble with this as evidence is that it was supplied to the French by none other than Wolsey himself, and one does not go around advertising such opposition unless one has a specific purpose in mind which, of course, Wolsey did. He was up to his usual ploy with the French, and here one can see it working in a rather precise way. For the French envoys rushed a courier back to Francis to warn him that, because of the extent of the opposition to the alliance, further bargaining and delay could result in no treaty at all. Francis took the hint, the French duly settled, and Wolsey had won a small diplomatic victory of the kind he was rather good at winning.
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The price of victory, however, was almost certainly a little exaggeration, if not a downright lie, for it is highly improbable that there would have been serious opposition amongst royal councillors to a French alliance, whatever their natural inclinations, and whatever the evidence to the contrary.

The attachment to France was fully discussed earlier, and all that needs to be stressed here is that to obtain the divorce it was essential, for it was only with French support that enough pressure could be exerted on the pope to grant it.
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This being so, to oppose the alliance would have been in effect to oppose the king in the matter
nearest to his heart, not a very sensible move for anyone aiming to bring down the king’s leading minister. Admittedly, it could be argued that, since in those negotiations with the French in April 1527 the effect of the divorce on the conduct of English foreign policy would not have been obvious, the alliance might at least have been questioned, but even that is not very likely. The argument of this book has been that, if many of the tactical decisions were Wolsey’s, Henry controlled the general direction of foreign policy, so that talk of opposition to Wolsey’s policy has to be misleading. This does not exclude the possibility that different points of view were being put to Henry by different councillors, indeed, it was their duty to do so,
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but if Henry decided the policy, then the only person to be toppled, if that policy was not to one’s liking was the king himself and the loyal and over-conscientious Norfolk was not likely to contemplate that! The French alliance had been the cornerstone of English policy for almost two years, and there is no evidence to suggest that in early 1527 Henry was having serious doubts about it.

What should also be remembered is that the tactics being used by Wolsey at this time were not crudely anti-Imperial; and at no point during this period, despite the reluctant declaration of war in January 1528, was Wolsey not engaged in some kind of negotiations with the emperor. Moreover, he had moved quickly to obviate the problems that a dislocation of trade with the Low Countries would bring, by making a separate truce with the regent, Margaret of Austria.
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Norfolk may not always have followed the intricacies of Wolsey’s foreign policy, but he would have been well aware of its broad outlines and of how far the popular caricature of Wolsey as one who had sold himself to the French was from the truth. None of this means that the duke may not have had some worries – when did he ever not! In 1531 it was the departing Venetian ambassador’s assessment that Norfolk bore ill-will to all foreigners;
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and there was always something of the Little Englander about him, a characteristic which combined happily with the Howard caution. So it would be understandable if he had expressed some concern about where a military commitment to France might lead to, and none knew better that the discontent in East Anglia was not unconnected with the current direction of English foreign policy – but to express such concern is a long way from plotting and caballing.

Dislike of the French alliance does not explain the plotting itself, but insofar as it greatly contributed to the growing unpopularity of Henry’s government from mid-1527 onwards, it does help to explain the widespread belief in such plotting, both at the time and since. Also contributing were the bad harvests, the disruption in foreign trade, and increasingly the divorce. Quite why the country came to Catherine’s defence in the remarkable way that almost every scrap of evidence suggests it did, is not entirely clear. She can hardly be called charismatic, but then perhaps merely by being a queen she acquired charisma. Moreover, she had been a devoted and loyal queen and wife for almost twenty years, and the injustice of her situation may have earned her the esteem of ordinary people, as well as many at court. True that it was perfectly possible under canon law to secure an annulment, and there may have been people, including, it would seem, Archbishop Warham,
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who genuinely believed that Henry had a case in law. But the common perception seems to have been, and surely quite rightly, that his case was mere casuistry, designed to enable him to marry the woman he loved or, more plainly, to bed his whore with a slightly better conscience. Not enough is usually made of the unpopularity of the divorce, or, indeed, of the general unpopularity of Henry’s government in the late 1520s, but it is a vital part of the present story, for it was bound to focus on the man who, as the king’s leading minister and cardinal legate, appeared to be responsible for much of what was going wrong. Criticisms of the king were also made,
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but it was much safer to lay the blame on one of his councillors; and anyway the whole panoply of kingship made it difficult to confront the man behind it. When the Amicable Grant had made royal government a target in the spring of 1525, Warham in an effort to console Wolsey had pointed out that ‘it hath been and ever shall be that whatsoever be in most favour and most of counsel with a great prince shall be maligned and ill spoken of, do he never so well’.
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If the remark fitted Wolsey’s situation in 1525, how much better did it fit it two years later.

And what the many problems facing Henry’s government in the late 1520s may have encouraged is that strain of anticlericalism which, it was suggested earlier, was endemic at court.
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In August 1527 the king’s secretary, William Knight, wrote to Wolsey, then in France, to warn him that since ‘the king and noblemen speak things incredible of the acts of Mr Allen and Cromwell’, it would be sensible for Wolsey to use someone other than Allen as his messenger to the king.
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The ‘Mr Allen’ was John Allen, Wolsey’s chief legatine commissary, who had carried out the visitations of monastic houses. Cromwell was at this time a leading member of Wolsey’s household, his principal task being the setting up of Wolsey’s colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. The suppression of the thirty-odd largely small monastic houses in order to provide endowments for these colleges had been unpopular, unleashing a combination of local sentiment and genuine religious feeling, as well as self-interest on the part of laymen with rights and interests in those houses.
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The following summer, in letters to Wolsey, Henry referred to the ‘great murmuring’ throughout England against Wolsey’s legatine officials, especially in connection with their work for his colleges, adding that he thought the murmuring justified. He had been informed that people were being forced to give money and land for the colleges in order to secure Wolsey’s favour, and, he alleged, many of these so-called gifts were illegal. Moreover, if, as reported, exempt monasteries were being allowed to buy back from Wolsey the right to be visited by members of their own order, this was to make a mockery of the whole purpose of Wolsey’s legatine powers. ‘If your legacy is a cloak
apud homines
’, warned Henry, ‘it is not
apud Deum
’, and he told Wolsey in no uncertain terms to mend his ways, and those of his officials,
immediately.
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Wolsey never accepted that these criticisms were valid,
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and neither does the present writer. Even Henry may have been merely venting his anger on Wolsey for preventing his beloved Anne from getting her way in the Wilton affair; at any rate the criticism came as part of a royal blast concerning Wolsey’s behaviour during that episode.
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But however unfair, and indeed hypocritical, Henry’s charges were, what is indisputable is that the criticism was being voiced in high places, and that Henry was showing himself not averse to using it against his cardinal. In this respect it is different from, and, from Wolsey’s point of view more worrying, than the probably much more widespread criticism being levelled against the alliance with France, where he was very much putting into effect the king’s policy, and could therefore feel confident of his protection. As regards the criticisms being made of his legatine powers, the king was showing himself to be not very protective, and this might encourage other people to work against him. It might even encourage Norfolk and Suffolk, especially as they were both affected by Wolsey’s suppressions, Norfolk because an earlier duke had founded Felixstowe Abbey, Suffolk by virtue of an earlier duke of Suffolk’s alleged refoundation of Snape Priory.